Comments on: Limiting total historical human emissionshttps://www.sindark.com/2009/04/30/limiting-total-historical-human-emissions/
climate, photos, miscellanyTue, 18 Dec 2018 18:51:24 +0000hourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.9.9By: .https://www.sindark.com/2009/04/30/limiting-total-historical-human-emissions/#comment-84407
Wed, 02 Dec 2009 16:12:48 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=5367#comment-84407“For starters, any public dialogue that talks about “percentage reductions in emissions” by a certain date is misleading. Because of the long residence time of CO2 in the atmosphere, it makes far more sense to talk about the amount of CO2 remaining to be released before we hit a peak CO2 concentration. Let’s call this the “remaining cumulative carbon emissions” method. After those emissions, we essentially need to emit zero carbon. This way of looking at the climate was first popularized by Krause, Bach, & Koomey, in an excellent book called “Energy Policy in the Greenhouse” (1992). It was revisited as a tool of understanding the climate challenge in two great Nature magazine articles this year. (Nature magazine is probably the most prestigious, and rigorous, of all the academic journals.) In one of those, Meinshausen et al., used this method of analysis to look at how you would limit the planet to 2 degrees C of warming.”
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Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:58:55 +0000http://www.sindark.com/?p=5367#comment-7523329 April 2009Hit the brakes hard

There is a climate splash in Nature this week, including a cover showing a tera-tonne weight, presumably meant to be made of carbon (could it be graphite?), dangling by a thread over the planet, and containing two new articles (Allen et al and Meinshausen et al), a “News & Views” piece written by two of us, and a couple commentaries urging us to “prepare to adapt to at least 4° C” and to think about what the worst case scenario (at 1000 ppm CO2) might look like.

Nature has devoted much of its April 30 issue to “The Coming Climate Crunch” (subs. req’d). Sadly, after sitting through pretty much the whole thing, I can’t actually recommend anybody else see buy it. Any regular reader of this blog will learn very little new from the dozen or so articles — and the issue fails utterly to provide its readers with the two must-haves in any comprehensive coverage of the issue:

1. A clear and specific understanding of the plausible worst-case scenario impacts facing the world post-2050 on our current emissions path.

2. A clear and specific understanding of the core climate solutions, policies for their rapid deployment, and an understanding of why the total cost of action is so darn low — one tenth of a penny on the dollar.